Words by Dan Q. Dao
When NME speaks with Sailorr over Zoom, she’s sitting on a porch back home on Jacksonville’s South Side, panning her camera to show us the wide, glassy river in front of her. Hot, humid and just a little surreal, Florida is a fitting origin for her world of moody alt-R&B, where flawed protagonists drift through emotional extremes with bite and bruised glamour. This is the setting that shaped her – both as a person and an artist.
“We’re country as hell – we like hunting and fishing,” shares Sailorr, born Kayla Le, of her hometown. “But there’s a huge mix of people. It’s a lot of Black people, Asians and Palestinians. You hear a lot of sounds out here. And then growing up with a Vietnamese immigrant family, it is video music on [long-running Vietnamese musical variety show] Paris by Night. And then being around my older cousins and friends, it was always R&B and hip-hop.”
The cover of her recent debut mixtape, ‘From Florida’s Finest’, where she transforms into a cockroach Animorphs-style, speaks to her own deadpan aesthetic of Florida noir. The irreverent, genre-blending project was born of momentum – one that caught Sailorr off guard back in November 2024 when her synth-laced breakup anthem ‘Pookie’s Requiem’ went viral. “I literally woke up and had gone from 2,000 followers to 20,000,” she recalls of her breakout moment. “The next day it was 100,000, then 200,000. It was insane.”
What started as a diss track she “didn’t think anybody was going to hear” soon topped Spotify’s Viral 50 and cracked the Top 10 of Billboard’s Hot R&B Songs chart. Its momentum caught the attention of Summer Walker, who joined Sailorr for a high-profile remix earlier this year. Around the same time, the 26-year-old was also named one of NME’s 100 essential emerging artists of the year. By April, she made her live debut, performing ‘Pookie’s Requiem’ during a guest appearance in 4batz’s Coachella set.
“That’s the beauty of making music. You don’t do it for anybody else”
Though she says she originally had no intentions for a full body of work, newfound fame pushed Sailorr to dive back into a deep vault of previously written tracks she’d been sitting on. “I started listening back to a lot of the music that we had already made for the past couple years, and it felt like some were jumping out to me,” Sailorr explains. “So then we would spend a lot of time workshopping, reading the room, and reading everyone’s feelings. I just tried not to force anything at all, because I feel like once it’s forced, it’s fucking dead.”
Sonically, ‘From Florida’s Finest’ builds on the brooding R&B of ‘Pookie’s Requiem’ with a more open-ended pop sensibility. It’s also a deeply personal, unvarnished manifesto on girlhood and love, with sharp, often humorous lyricism throughout. “Boy, you a waste, so I ain’t shaving my legs for you no more,” she quips on ‘Done Shaving 4 U’. Peppered in are playful skits like ‘Gimme Dat Lug Nut’, an iPhone-recorded, profanity-laden reenactment of busting a tyre on a kerb.
There are more honest and open moments on the record, too, like ‘Grrl’s Grrl’ – a dreamy, hopeful R&B lullaby where she bounces between breathy falsetto and rap deliveries. “It was probably the first time I had ever said on a song that I like girls,” she explains. “I remember my sister was visiting Los Angeles that day and she came to my recording session. I just felt weird and didn’t want to be vulnerable in front of her. So I was like, ‘Yo, you gotta leave now.’”
Being vulnerable with herself and admitting her queerness out loud was one thing, but being upfront with the world has proved even more complex. The virality of ‘Pookie’s Requiem’ and Sailorr’s subsequent success has brought unprecedented scrutiny on her, with some critics pointing to her use of AAVE in her music. Sailorr doesn’t deny the discourse, but neither does she shy away from it.
“I feel as though all my writing and all of my artistry is an authentic expression of myself. But people think that I’m trying to put out a caricature of what I think Black culture is – and that’s a valid concern because there are genuinely a lot of people who do that shit,” she explains. “So I’m not going to sit here and be like, ‘You can’t feel that way.’ I can only show you with more time and with more music.”
Born to former Vietnamese refugees, Sailorr speaks about home – her high school thespian career, a stint working at her parents’ nail salon, moving in with that older sister who she says truly raised her – with a mixture of fondness and distance. Though she doesn’t romanticise the Sunshine State, the title ‘From Florida’s Finest’ alone suggests a kind of reconciliation with her past.
“I was really just speaking from the heart, speaking from my relationship experiences, speaking from losing friendships and being queer,” she says. “From always having to fit within a mould or within a box, whether that be from the conservatism in Florida or from my family.” It was this honest desire to find her voice that led her to singing in the first place.
“I thought I wanted to be a Broadway star,” she laughs of her high school dreams. “I wanted to act, and I wanted to be the musical theatre baby. But it felt way more authentic to be able to perform my own writing.” This authenticity, though, also meant trying to rediscover roots she once shunned: “I don’t shy away from my heritage, but I also don’t think I identified with it all the way.”
“If I woke up every day and tried to make a song for somebody else, this shit would be miserable as fuck”
With such a fast-paced ascent, Sailorr has had to reorient her understanding of success – and of self-care. The pressure to meet the expectations of an ever-growing audience can be intense, but she says she’s found strength in looking inward and back: toward her own family history, toward the resilience she observed growing up in a traditional immigrant household.
“Going to school where you don’t see anybody that fucking looks like you… I tried my best to not present as an Asian person. But I actually love my people, my family and how I was brought up in this world,” she says. “Vietnamese people and immigrants overall just have that sense of perseverance. Growing up around a bunch of people who had to make something out of literally nothing, it feels vindicating. It doesn’t matter what the fuck is being thrown at me, I’m still going to show up and I’m still going to keep going.”
She’s also finding ways to lean into the cultural traditions she once tried to hide. She wore a pink and black áo dài, Vietnam’s national dress, for a Genius live performance. And she’s unapologetically taken up teeth blackening, an ancient beautification practice in Asia, as a way to connect with the memory of her grandmother, whom she credits with teaching her about motherhood and womanhood.
“My grandma was one of the first people that represented femininity to me,” Sailorr explains. “When she was in America, she was always scrutinised for blackening her teeth. But when my teeth are black, I feel very feminine. I have these soft features, this soft way of how I dress, but then I open my mouth and it’s so hard. It symbolises a sense of beauty, maturity and literal wealth.”
These days, Sailorr says she’s trying to move with more intention – leaning into what feels good, rather than what’s expected of her. “If I woke up every day and tried to make a song for somebody else, this shit would be miserable as fuck,” she says. “That’s the beauty of making music. You don’t do it for anybody else.”
“All my writing and artistry is an authentic expression of myself”
She’s also currently deep in prep for her first-ever headlining tour, which kicks off this month – kicking her smoking habit for the plot. “Baby, after all these years, I just don’t breathe the same,” she says, half-laughing, half-panicked. “I’m literally trying so hard to be good because the last thing I want is for bitches to come for me and be like, ‘She can’t fucking sing.’ But I’m having a lot of fun piecing it together. This is me in my element. I finally get to put my music on a stage.”
According to Sailorr, the show isn’t some arena-scale spectacle – there’s no elaborate lighting rig or big-budget set pieces. Rather, the singer is pulling from her theatre-kid roots, writing original scripts for different skits to connect with the audience. “It’s literally off the strength of the acting and the narrative,” she says. “It’s giving high school thespian festival – but it’s going to be cunt. I’m super excited to see all the faces. Because, in case you didn’t notice, I got glasses now. I was just existing without them for a year. But now I can see you.”
Her vision for the tour is simple: “I want everybody to come and leave feeling like they just went on a fucking road trip with Sailorr,” she grins. “Like, ‘Damn, that’s my homegirl.’ Even if it’s a middle-aged white man. I hope he fucking feels like, ‘Wow, girlhood. Amazing. Now I understand.’”
Sailorr’s ‘From Florida’s Finest’ is out now via BuVision
Listen to Sailorr’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify or on Apple Music here.
Words: Dan Q. Dao
Photography: Kristen Jan Wong
Styling: Freak City LA
Makeup: Jazzmin Odie
Hair: Jocelyn Vega
Label: BuVision